Still Lifes with Fever

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2023

Abstract

This poem belongs to a sequence revolving around the alleged Marian apparitions which occurred in the town of Agoo, Philippines in 1993, as witnessed by Judiel Angelle Nieva, a trans woman. The project is preoccupied with forming a simulacrum of the aggregated consciousness of the town: the poems display the evolution and diffusion of the plural first-person pronoun, morphing based on provisional instances of solidarity born of oppression and belief, class resentment, and a keen investment and sense of complicity in the entire devotional extravaganza. The project intends to navigate the paradoxes emerging from the encounter between poetic form and historical subject, to adopt the unifying idiom of a lyric that derives its authority from seeming communal while also telegraphing the irreconcilabilities that exist within this ostensible community. “Fever Panoramas” draws from Florent Joseph Sals’s The History of Agoo, as well as the following sources: an essay by Hervé Guibert; a historical account by David Carter; news/feature articles by Regine Cabato, Rambo Talabong and Jodesz Gavilan, and Lito Zulueta; poetry by Lucie Brock-Broido and Wina Puangco; a statement delivered by Salvador Panelo; and a translation of Homer by Emily Wilson.

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